


The Sun's Companion

by AuthorinExile



Series: In the Company of the Sun [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Childbirth, Don't Examine This Too Closely, F/M, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Hurt No Comfort, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I made myself sad, I'm Sorry, Implied Sexual Content, Loss, Made For Each Other, True Love, off-screen childbirth, playing fast and loose with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 15:32:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13274445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorinExile/pseuds/AuthorinExile
Summary: “But in your face, I behold the sun's companion. The dawn of Akatosh's bright glory may banish the coming darkness.”The Hero of Kvatch convinced herself that she knew what the Emperor meant when he spoke in riddles. It was the only way he had ever really spoken to her, and she thought that she had the hang of it by now.She thought that since the other prophecies he had revealed to her had all come to fruition in some form or another, this “sun’s companion” business would be figured out rather easily and solved rather quickly.She thought that for quite some time in quite a few different ways.Always, she was wrong.~~~~~~The Hero of Kvatch convinces herself that she knows exactly what the Emperor meant when he spoke to her in riddles. As the days go on and her perspective changes, she tells herself that she understands everything there is to know about the "sun's companion."Unfortunately for her, she forgot to leave it in context when she pieced it together.





	The Sun's Companion

The Emperor had spoken to her almost exclusively in riddles.

  
That wasn’t so awful, she supposed. Crazy old men had the right to speak in as many riddles as they liked, and it wasn’t doing her any harm. And, once she realized that Emperor Uriel--“Septim VII,” Jauffre would shout at her whenever she shortened it around him--must have been a seer of some sort, it was a strange sort of fun to decipher his messages.

  
“Close shut the Jaws of Oblivion,” for example, had been wildly interesting to hear about in theory and a tiny bit extremely terrifying to see in practice.

  
There were a great many of these sorts of riddles, she discovered. Every now and again, she would happen upon some strange individual or some event which seemed guided exclusively by the cosmos, and she would think, _So this is what he meant._

  
A great many of these riddles seemed to reflect some dramatic pain she would experience, and one might expect that she would spend a great deal of time deciphering them and trying to prevent these terrors from occurring, but there was only one of these prophecies which was guaranteed to always draw her attention. Of course, it happened to be the one wherein he mentioned the “sun’s companion.”

  
She had not told Jauffre about that particular riddle/prophecy, but she wasn’t really sure why. There was something about the fact that he had said it so soon after discussing his own death as casually as he had that made it feel strangely intimate. There was also the phrasing: “But in your face, I behold the sun's companion.”

  
She wasn’t entirely sure why, but that had felt like something meant exclusively for her to hear and understand. There was something there that just didn’t fit the rest of his proclamations, but it drove her mad when she tried to understand _why_ it was different.

  
Then she had gone to Kvatch and been properly terrified by the daedra pouring from one of those “Jaws of Oblivion” she had heard so much about, and she had looked upon Martin and thought him unimpressive. He had thought much the same about her, apparently.

  
Then, she thought that she had solved the puzzle.

  
_Of course, he’s the sun’s companion_ , she had thought in the camp that very night, _He’s a priest of Akatosh. Who else would it be?_

  
She had been content with that, for a time.

  
~~~~~~

  
Being around someone almost constantly is the one and only way to guarantee that you will grow closer to that person. The newly named Hero of Kvatch discovered this the hard way.

  
Every time she returned to Cloud Ruler Temple, Martin was there to greet her. Jauffre always gave her the most disappointed looks when she called him by his first name, but Martin had refused to allow her to call him by any of the formalities that the other Blades used, to her utter surprise.

  
“We’ve shed blood together, and that was before I knew about any of this nonsense. We’re friends,” he had said, smiling at her in a way that made her think that he must have done _incredibly_ well as a worshipper of Sanguine, “and my friends call me by my name.”

  
It wasn’t until she returned from the Mythic Dawn’s shrine that she realized how _very_ friendly indeed they had gotten with one another.

  
Martin fussed and worried over each of her wounds, refusing to fully accept that she was a skilled warrior and fairly accustomed to this sort of thing by now. It had been nice, at first, to be treated so well, but Martin was to be Emperor, and she had worried at what such attention on her might mean.

  
The constant hovering and pampering had gotten on her very last nerve when she shouted, “And why do you care anyway? There are other Blades, and I’d be willing to bet that you don’t hover over them so! If I were to die, then someone else would gladly take my place!”

  
And Martin had replied, “If you were to die, there could _never_ be another in your place,” and thoroughly kissed her.

  
She would later identify that one moment, that single kiss, as the spot in time that guaranteed her destruction, but even then, she would know that she was helpless to stop it.

  
So it had gone: declarations of love upon every separation and reunion, nights spent in the passion that only a deeply held love can assure, and the quiet promise that Martin would not-- _could not_ \--suffer the burden of ruling without her at his side.

  
Martin had doted on her, and she had adored him. She had, in fact, loved Martin with an unparalleled vigor. Never before had she felt this way for another and, she knew, never again would she feel the deep burning that always ignited in her belly at the mere sight of Martin Septim.

  
“This,” she would say whenever Martin was weighed down by the burdens of his new position, and she felt the need to see his marvelous smile stretch like a shard of silver across his face, “is the sort of love that epics are written about, my dear. This is the exact sort of wondrously surreal story that will be immortalized in poems and artworks for centuries. The Bards’ College will adore us!”

  
And Martin would laugh and pick her up and carry her away to his room where they would stay for hours in a whirlwind of love and lust, planning their future in the moments when they were not devouring one another.

  
It was in the aftermath of one such occasion, as she lay in the bed they shared and stared at Martin’s sleeping face, that she had thought to herself, _I see, now, what Uriel meant. How could I have never before understood that there is no sun brighter than you, my dear?_

  
She had delighted in having all in her tiny pocket of the world be aright.

  
Then they had gone to relight the Dragonfires, and her lovely piece of the world had fallen apart.

  
The battle had been nightmarish all on its own, but she had guarded Martin with every ounce of determination that she could salvage.

  
If she felt drained or if she were injured, any thoughts spared for these things were dispelled at the very notion of Martin being harmed in the slightest.

  
Then Martin had rushed inside the Temple of the One with the Hero of Kvatch on his heels.

  
He had turned to her, kissed her farewell, and both thanked her and apologized to her in the same breath, and then…

  
And then Martin Septim was no more, and the Avatar of Akatosh floated where her love had once stood.

  
She watched that final battle play out in a state of shock that shook her to her very core.

  
Then the Avatar froze upon the altar--still and stiff and stone, as if he had always been that way, as if she had not been cradled in his arms only a few nights ago, as if he had not kissed her only moments before--and she had fallen to her knees in silent weeping.

  
~~~~~~

  
There were ceremonies to attend after that.

  
People mourned the fallen of the battle but rejoiced that very few civilians had been caught in the crossfire. There was talk of restorations and promises to always honor the hero who gave his life for all of Tamriel, the famed Martin Septim. Some people worried over what would become of the Empire now, but most were stuck between gratitude and grief. Some few scholars spent many days after the final confrontation arguing the finer points of Martin’s sacrifice, wondering if he truly died or if he ascended to rule the heavens alongside his ancestor, Tiber Septim.

  
The Hero--now the Champion--was left behind in the dust of the battle.

  
Baurus--who was the only Blade the Champion had ever truly considered a friend and the only person she had ever dared to trust enough to tell of the love she held for a Septim--had hugged her and whispered his deepest and most heartfelt apologies into her ear.

  
Jauffre--who must have known, there was no way he didn’t know, Martin told him everything, so _he had to know_ \--only nodded at her solemnly and said, “I am sorry. I know that you were...close. His loss will be hard for everyone.”

  
~~~~~~

  
A week after the battle, she turned in her Blades regalia and told Jauffre that she couldn’t bear to stay. She had not provided a reason, certain as she was that he _knew_ the reason, but only said that she had guarded the emperor she had sworn to, and even that had not saved him.

  
A week after that, she was given a suit of armor emblazoned with sigils and designs that she could no longer bear to look at, but that she could not quite bring herself to be rid of, either. Instead, she stored it in her favorite house and pretended to forget it.

  
In the weeks that followed, she tried her damnedest to bury her sorrow under the weight of countless adventures and explorations, but nothing worked. She didn’t even have the hope of quietly disappearing from the map because, as the most recent Champion of Cyrodiil, she was constantly being recognized by the handful of grateful citizens who saw the sketches posted of her.

  
She had just begun to wonder if staying in Cyrodiil--or, indeed, on the mortal plane--was worth it, when she grew very ill and was strong-armed into visiting a healer by Baurus, who she had made sure to keep in touch with.

  
The healer completed an examination that bordered on _too_ thorough and beamed at her.

  
“Congratulations,” the old woman croaked. “You’re a few weeks along.”

 

~~~~~~

  
A few weeks short of nine months after the day the Champion of Cyrodiil lost the love of her life, she looked down, exhausted, into a tiny, rounded face with a smile like a shard of silver and the same eyes that she saw every morning in the mirror, and she wondered, distantly, if this child’s grandfather had been warning her about the dangers of being the sun’s companion or congratulating her on the same.

She honestly had no idea, and these days, she did not pretend to understand prophecies.


End file.
